I don’t know what the answer is to any of it, but if you’ve never spent time on a reservation beyond going to the gift shop or the casino, you should if ever given the chance. Whatever you think you know, might change a little bit.
Agree.
Having spent a lot of my time next to reservations and having tribal friends, the world of reservation life is not anything we would confuse with a headstart in life.
Commonly, most US citizens aren't aware of the basics of property ownership on reservations. On most reservations, people do not have a deed to their land or house. Yes, they live there and they get to treat it like their own, but on many reservations I am familiar with, they don't have any vested property right in that house/land.
Without the basic principle of property rights, it is pretty hard to see capitalism prosper the way it does off the reservation. Are you going to make a big financial investment in assets you don't have ownership rights in? No, nobody would do that.
Is a bank or capital source going to lend money for property if the lender cannot take a security interest as collateral? No, not a bank or lender in the world will do that. So how do you stimulate economic growth when access to capital, one of the basic principles of commerce, does not exist?
We tend to try apply our non-reservation ideas in a system or culture that doesn't operate on the same principles of capitalism and free enterprise that exists off reservations. If people took more time to understand how different the laws and property rights are on reservations compared to what we take for granted, there would be a lot more understanding of the depth and complexity of the problem.
The old sayings about "assimilate" or "get a job" or whatever, might feel good to the person saying it but it is pretty hard to assimilate when your basic rules of governance don't recognize the fundamental principles the non-reservation world expects you to "assimilate to." Anyone who tells me that tribal members should "assimilate" is usually a defacto statement of how little the claimant understands about tribal law, lack of property rights, form of governance, and the economic/social complications created by such arrangement.
Imagine if you had no rights in your house, your land, your rental building, the assets needed to run your business. How much would you invest in those assets? I suspect you wouldn't invest much, if any. You'd probably invest about the same amount that you invest in your neighbor's property that you don't own.
Yet, many non-reservation folks, such as some have stated on this thread, simplify the complexities by saying "assimilate" when the basic tenets of capitalism and governance that would be needed to start assimilating don't even exist. There are a ton of other social, cultural, and historical issues that explain why life on reservations is so difficult. Not saying property rights would solve all the challenges, but us white folks who lack much understanding of the realities that exist aren't going to solve these complex problems with our loud shouts demanding tribal members to "assimilate."
www.apmreports.org
